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So pervasive is the phenomenon of the failure-to-launch generation of modern young men that it has become the target of sociological exploration, the most recent a just-released British study commissioned by Nickelodeon UK that claims the age at which men today reach maturity — at least in the emotional sense — is, wait for it, 43. Which, notes the study, is 11 years later than for women.

To underscore its findings, the study gleefully provides tell-tale signs of the average immature adult male: he drag races in his Chevy Vega, he thinks burping and farting are high comedy, he employs radio silence during an argument, he dances like Elaine on Seinfeld, he doesn’t own a jacket without a sports logo, and he can neither boil an egg nor load a washing machine.

This probably isn’t news to you, and you could argue that it’s a thesis that suffers from some generalization, but there is truth in the telling and it might even be worth a chuckle if it wasn’t so troubling.

Yes, we all know that girls mature faster than boys, and that girls can’t wait to cut the apron strings, while boys tend to take longer to leave the bosom of the family.

But how did we go from a time in which cavemen were born to hunt, gather and protect the family unit to an era in which grown men sleep until noon and think Adam Sandler is a thespian genius?

Why is it okay that we’re allowing our boys to evolve softer than a tub of margarine when what we really need are men of steel?

Well, we all know the answer, don’t we?

We are a society that coddles our boys. We — and by we I mean mostly mothers, sisters, aunts and grandmothers — do their laundry, cook their dinner and make their beds. As parents, we buy their smart phones and PlayStations and fast cars and, on the soccer pitch, we buy the everyone-is-equal ethos that strips them of their competitive spirit and quashes their genetic inclination to be better, stronger, faster, a biological urge that recalls when survival of the fittest meant just that.

We seldom let our boys fight their own battles, inside or outside the sandbox.

And so we produce wusses, so discouraged from acting like boys that we have to publish titles like The Dangerous Books for Boys so they can read about how not to crash in a soap-box derby, or how to build a pup tent in the back yard and fire a pellet gun at a tin can on a fence post.

Not only don’t we expect them to grow up into real men, society in general actively encourages arrested adolescence while discouraging innate masculinity, whether it’s university curricula larded with male-bashing women’s studies or a pop culture landscape littered with men who are either emasculated wimps or revered skirt-chasers. (Is it any wonder that as Lululemon campaigns to get more men in yoga pants and as cinema’s Superman gets prettier and prettier, that it’s the redneck, from duck hunters and swamp people to mountain men and crab fishermen, who is emerging as the new pop culture hero?)

It may be that we pamper our boys because we feel guilty as working parents, or because we want them to have what we didn’t at their age. Maybe we’re single, single moms especially, and can’t bear the notion of being alone, so we are reluctant to nudge our sons from the nest.

There are cultural reasons, too.

In Italy, for instance, spoiled young men are called mammonis, or mama’s boys, and sometimes bamboccionis, which translates to big babies. It’s estimated that eight out of 10 Italians under the age of 30 still live at home, and the majority are males. In 2007, the government deemed it an economic issue, and voted to subsidize rents and offer tax incentives to get the boys away from mom’s lasagne and working toward social and financial independence.

The problem of failure-to-launch is such a hot button these days that there’s even a movie with that title, starring Matthew McConaughey as a thirty-something indolent being tricked by his indulgent but fed-up parents into moving out of the family home.

Interesting that the Nickelodeon study, timed for the release of a new British television show called Wendell and Vinnie about a 30-year-old bachelor who takes in his young, much-wiser nephew, also found that eight of 10 women surveyed think men can’t stop being childish, and that 46 per cent of women are fed up with mothering their male partners.

We might think that a 40-year-old guy wearing cartoon pyjamas is the stuff of amusing statistics, but if what the world — and women — really need are a few good men, then maybe we should start letting our boys grow up.

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